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LWN's Latest Linux Kernel Articles (Paywall Has Expired)

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 17th of January 2019 08:27:45 AM Filed under
Linux
  • The rest of the 5.0 merge window

    Linus Torvalds released 5.0-rc1 on January 6, closing the merge window for this development cycle and confirming that the next release will indeed be called "5.0". At that point, 10,843 non-merge change sets had been pulled into the mainline, about 2,100 since last week's summary was written. Those 2,100 patches included a number of significant changes, though, including some new system-call semantics that may yet prove to create problems for existing user-space code.

  • A setback for fs-verity

    The fs-verity mechanism, created to protect files on Android devices from hostile modification by attackers, seemed to be on track for inclusion into the mainline kernel during the current merge window when the patch set was posted at the beginning of November. Indeed, it wasn't until mid-December that some other developers started to raise objections. The resulting conversation has revealed a deep difference of opinion regarding what makes a good filesystem-related API and may have implications for how similar features are implemented in the future.
    The core idea behind fs-verity is the use of a Merkle tree to record a hash value associated with every block in a file. Whenever data from a protected file is read, the kernel first verifies the relevant block(s) against the hashes, and only allows the operation to proceed if there is a match. An attacker may find a way to change a critical file, but there is no way to change the Merkle tree after its creation, so any changes made would be immediately detected. In this way, it is hoped, Android systems can be protected against certain kinds of persistent malware attacks.

    There is no opposition to the idea of adding functionality to the kernel to detect hostile modifications to files. It turns out, though, there there is indeed some opposition to how this functionality has been implemented in the current patch set. See the above-linked article and this documentation patch for details of how fs-verity is meant to work. In short, user space is responsible for the creation of the Merkle tree, which must be surrounded by header structures and carefully placed at the beginning of a block after the end of the file data. An ioctl() call tells the kernel that fs-verity is to be invoked on the file; after that, the location of the end of the file (from a user-space point of view) is changed to hide the Merkle tree from user space, and the file itself becomes read-only.

  • Pressure stall monitors

    One of the useful features added during the 4.20 development cycle was the availability of pressure-stall information, which provides visibility into how resource-constrained the system is. Interest in using this information has spread beyond the data-center environment where it was first implemented, but it turns out that there some shortcomings in the current interface that affect other use cases. Suren Baghdasaryan has posted a patch set aimed at making pressure-stall information more useful for the Android use case — and, most likely, for many other use cases as well.

»

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